The Two-Minute Verdict
Hot Tub Time Machine Delivers Us, Coke-Flecked And Pruned, Back To 1986
Sure, the other Movieline guys might be busy at Comic-Con with realish-looking, 10-foot CGI aliens, lycanthrope six-packs, and, um, Jonah Hill doing some spray-paint-assisted Street Fighter promotion. But I can argue that I’m having much more fun here at home, safely 125 miles away from the teeming, shower-impaired masses in San Diego (I know, I know, harping on the smell at Comic-Con is cliche, but: this), because I was sitting by my computer when the red-band trailer for Hot Tub Time Machine, the much-anticipated John Cusack vehicle that does not involve a battleship being tossed at his Apocalypse-fleeing family, was posted this morning. And that trailer will now serve as the subject of our latest installment of the Two-Minute Verdict.
Before we begin, a disclosure: Am I utterly in the tank for a movie about a time-bending Jacuzzi that stars Cusack, Rob Corrdry, and Craig Robinson, and which has the self-awareness to be called Hot Tub Time Machine, rather than something like Whirlpool: 1986 or a hackneyed reference to a some lyric from a one-hit-wonder from the 1980s? Yes, yes I am. I am constitutionally predisposed to be excited for this trailer, even if it had consisted of nothing besides the film’s logo followed by a succession of title cards reading: “John Cusack.” “Gets Into A Hot Tub That Goes Back In Time” “With Some Other Dudes You Like” “February 2010.” Indeed, I can be very easy to please.
But, thrillingly, we get much more than that. So much more.
We get an ominous opening montage name-checking historical geniuses whose pioneering work in (admittedly inferior) pre-time-traveling-hot-tub intellectual disciplines will prepare us for what is to come: Nostradamus, Galileo, Einstein.
We get a stunned voiceover expressing the sentiment that our still-comprehending brains wish to deliver to our mouths, but can’t, because our vocal chords are paralyzed with awe: “HO-LEE shit.”
We get our first glance at the bubbling cauldron that will melt our protagonists into its agitated, well-chlorinated waters, wash them away them through the space-time continuum like so much unwanted bodily fluid through a spa filter, and then reconstitute them in the past wholly intact, if somewhat pruney.
We get Cusack poo-pooing Craig Robinson’s theory that the hot tub that has transported them back in time might, in fact, be “some kind of…hot tub time machine!”
We get a lively, if brief, debate about the possibility of time travel.
And then we get Robinson’s face caked in enough cocaine to make the septum of a Hollywood producer sympathetically disintegrate, eliciting the kind of motormouth rant fully comprehensible only to those who have also recently dipped their heads into punch bowls brimming with blow.
Oh, yes, I am in the tank. Or in the hot tub, as it were, because “tank” is so close to “hot tub” that to ignore it at this point would just be silly.
VERDICT: Dear MGM: Please move up the release date to, hmmm, let’s say next week? OK, terrific. See you then!
Hot Tub Time Machine Red Band Trailer [TrailerSpy]
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Posted 24 Jul 2009, 1:04 PM
The "Hot Tub Time Machine Theme" with lyrics like "Yeah your shirt's a little psychedelic/And you're lookin kinda like Tom Selleck" and "Want blow? All you gotta do is yell" better remain.
Posted 24 Jul 2009, 1:52 PM
This will either be the most brilliant movie ever made or will cause John Cusack to burst into a flames at the first screening.
Posted 24 Jul 2009, 5:47 PM
I am so in for this.